


you take the weight off me

by floweryfran



Series: my girl(s) [4]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Awesome Natasha Romanov, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt Peter Parker, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Peter Parker & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Peter Parker Dances, Peter Parker Gets a Hug, Peter Parker Has Nightmares, Peter Parker Has a Family, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker Whump, Peter Parker has PTSD, Precious Peter Parker, Protective Natasha Romanov, Teen Peter Parker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:34:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23124070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floweryfran/pseuds/floweryfran
Summary: Peter sings again. He is trying to tune it out. The way the crack of their skin is starting to sound like the echoes of creaking metal in the place between his ears.“When I was down, I was your clown,”he sings, slightly breathless with the strain of keeping speed with Natasha while singing both parts, because he knows she will not do him the solid of being the Elton to his Kiki Dee.“Oo-hoo, nobody knows it. Right from the start, I gave you my— oof.”Peter is pinned face-down and suddenly his vision bends, like surging waters breaking a strained dam, and it is not Natasha’s weight pressing on him but that of ten tons of concrete, dust papering his mouth, his back cracks, his ribs crunch, a piece of rebar is poking into his thigh, nails pierce his shoulders, his lungs are empty, what a lovely memory it is to have breathed.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Natasha Romanov
Series: my girl(s) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1659547
Comments: 52
Kudos: 416





	you take the weight off me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peterstank](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterstank/gifts).



> this is for @peterstank because i LOVE HER and her natasha & peter from 'built from scraps' and the ensuing universe is the ultimate version. @ my readers, read that whole series if you havent or i'll straight up cut ur ears off. actually, read everything she has ever written bc she's a genius. 
> 
> sorry if this is annoying friend i just love u & i hope life treats u like the regal entity you are <3

When Natasha finds Peter, he is in a rather compromised position.

The lights are off but he sits near a pair of glass french doors, cross-legged on the kitchen floor in boxers and an oversized Midtown t-shirt under the sapphire glow of deep night, the Roomba gutted in front of him. He is implanting a sound chip into the base of it. There’s a screwdriver held between his teeth and he’s humming under his breath, the sound of his own voice vibrating in his throat being his best attempt to drown out the too-loud thud of his heart. Beside his left knee is a pair of scissors, a stack of construction paper, and a beaker of paste. 

“Hey,” Peter says around the screwdriver, not looking up. “I wi’ ex’lain in a secon’.”

Natasha doesn’t answer. Instead, she comes and sits beside him.

She watches him work for a long few minutes, silent as Peter slides the scissors along the paper, cutting out two bean-shapes and a tiny, rounded triangle, trying to hide the slight tremble in his hands. He folds a short edge on each bean flat and glues them to the top of the Roomba above the googly eyes that are already attached. The paper stands upright, cemented by his (frighteningly permanent) failed-web-fluid superglue.

Peter feels the air shift when Natasha realizes what he’s doing.

"Does that sound chip just have bark noises on it?" she asks.

"Yup," Peter responds.

“You’re a doofus,” she says factually.

“Your point?” Peter says, gluing the triangle down next, between the eyes and a few inches lower.

“This is what you chose to do to entertain yourself at—” she squints at the clock over the oven, “two-thirty-six in the morning on a Saturday.”

“Well,” Peter says. “May and I can’t have a dog at our apartment and Tony refuses to even hear the word _dog_ until Morgan grows out of that witching-hour thing she’s been doing,” this is true; Morgan wakes up around three every morning and screams her little lungs hoarse until four, no matter what they do to comfort her, “so I figure I oughta make my own dog. Using my resources. Didn’t you teach me that in spider school?”

“I didn’t mean for it to make you an even bigger idiot.”

“That’s pretty rude, _sestra pauk.”_ The Russian is a joke between them, at this point. Peter has picked up the basics- gun, bullet, duck, run, vodka, no, bad, stupid, red, spider, and a few choice four-letter words- but his accent is horrendous, and he only ever slips into it to give Nat a smile. 

She obliges. 

He starts humming again, slipping slowly into the words. _“Mm mm mm hmm mm mm. I wouldn’t if I tried.”_

“Oh, no,” she says. “That’s what you were humming? I couldn’t tell before because you have absolutely no sense of pitch, which, frankly, I preferred to this, because at least then I could pretend it was something else. Anything else.”

_“Don’t go breaking my,”_ he sings. _“Don’t go breaking my. Said don’t go breaking my heart.”_

“I won’t,” she says.

“I know,” he answers. He shakes out his hands. They vibrate.

She reaches over and ruffles his hair, then winces and retracts her touch. “Why is your hair disgusting.”

Peter’s knee hits the superglue and he almost tips the beaker, only catching it due to the shot of prickling premonition that jumps up and down his spine like a rubber band snapped too hard. He clears his throat and sets it back down a few inches away from himself. 

“You’re not okay, Petya,” Nat says.

Peter knows she would not say it aloud if she did not care, and it makes his chest warm despite it all.

“I, uh,” he says. “Nightmare. Woke up all sweaty and gross and I needed to— do something, to settle down.”

“And you chose to bastardize the Roomba rather than take a hot shower?” 

“To each their own,” Peter says.

She leans over, elbows on her knees, face angled to meet his eyes. Hers glean the color of seaweed under unsteady waves, even in the dark. “You’re restless. Let’s go spar.”

Peter squints at her. It’s a crazy life he leads, where he can squint at the Black Widow without fearing she’ll tear his intestines out through his asshole for it. The perks of training with her every weekend since his sixteenth birthday, he guesses.

“It’s not like either of us are going to be sleeping, and you’re done with that monstrosity anyway,” she says, and Peter can’t refute that, so he leaves his Roomba demonization under the table and rises to his feet, unsteady.

She stretches while he puts on a pair of leggings and a loose t-shirt, tapes his knuckles. They do some dance warm-ups together— she’s been forcing him to dust off his old ballet, even though it has been almost four years since he’d quit, and it makes his thighs and the arches of his feet hurt like a bitch but he feels something settle in his chest when she has FRIDAY play the _Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia,_ and she soft-shoes what would be en pointe because they’re on the mats, and she is all graceful pink lines and a blur of fierce red like a wildfire devouring, and he joins in, light-footed and stoic, and they improvise their own lifts, Natasha draped over his neck, his hands on her thighs, her hands on his shoulders, adding their own _développés_ and _penchés_ and _chasséing_ around each other in great, looping rings. The dance turns harsh as the _Adagio_ turns into the first act battle song from _The Nutcracker_ and their moves hasten, sharpen, and suddenly Natasha’s thighs are on either side of Peter’s throat and he’s hurtling towards the mat, but then he’s up and she is, too, and he gets an arm around her neck, an elbow in her ribs, she is flipped and flattened, breath puffing from her lips.

She stares up at him. “Not bad,” she says.

He reaches a hand down to help her up.

She yanks him forward onto his face and then they’re going again, slick with sweat, hearts racing in tandem, neither holding back but Natasha still flaying him alive and then roasting him on a spit over an open fire, her knee bruising his ribs, his elbow catching her cheekbone, her forearm choking him, his heel coming down hard on the top of her foot. He’s got a blackening eye, she’s got a split lip, they’re fighting dirty, and FRIDAY is no longer playing music. Their song is that of the rhythm of the heels of their hands thudding against toughened muscle, the breath that puffs from between their lips, their bones hitting the mats, their whispered curses, their taunts, their laughter. 

Peter sings again. He is trying to tune it out. The way the crack of their skin is starting to sound like the echoes of creaking metal in the place between his ears. _“When I was down, I was your clown,”_ he sings, slightly breathless with the strain of keeping speed with Natasha while singing both parts, because he knows she will not do him the solid of being the Elton to his Kiki Dee. _“Oo-hoo, nobody knows it. Right from the start, I gave you my— oof.”_

Peter is pinned face-down and suddenly his vision bends, like surging waters breaking a strained dam, and it is not Natasha’s weight pressing on him but that of ten tons of concrete, dust papering his mouth, his back cracks, his ribs crunch, a piece of rebar is poking into his thigh, nails pierce his shoulders, his lungs are empty, what a lovely memory it is to have breathed.

Then Natasha’s voice, “Peter,” sharp and loud, and his cheek is sticky against the mat and his arm is bent behind his back, Natasha sitting on top of his ass with a knee on either side of him, and he crawls free from under her, sending her sprawling. He jumps to his feet, paces, his footsteps loud.

“Hey,” Natasha says. “Where are you.”

“Here,” he says. 

“Where did you go?” she says. 

“Twenty-sixteen,” he says. “Under a building.”

“Happens to the best of us,” she says.

He turns over his shoulder to look at her. She is flat on her back, hands crossed over her stomach, staring at the ceiling vaguely. Her chest rises and falls so steadily that it must be controlled, she is trying so, so hard.

“Is that what you dreamt of?” she says. “Earlier?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s been years. I don’t know why it still freaks me sometimes.”

He crosses to her side, sits. Mirrors her position. 

“Have you ever been—” Peter starts unsteadily. “Have you ever been in a situation you didn’t think you’d make it out of?”

“Uh, yeah,” she says.

“Yeah,” Peter nods, his hair rasping against the mat, “that was a stupid question. My bad.” He sucks in a breath that tastes like their sweat, that tastes like free fall, that tastes like ash and the turn of someone’s back when you need to stare into their eye. “Did you, um, ever get over it?”

She is quiet for a moment. Peter knows that means she will be honest. He likes to think he knows Natasha as well as he knows Ned or MJ at this point, reading her quirks as he does. Maybe he doesn’t yet know her at her atomic level the way he does May and Tony, but she’s right up there. They’ve seen each other low, offered each other a hand up, and then leveled each other just to laugh at their sprawl. She’s his older sister. 

“If I ever do,” she says, and her voice is uneven, overbalanced, “I’ll let you know.”

Peter extends a hand to her. She takes it. Their calluses do not match. They chafe against each other, their hardened parts corresponding with each other’s smoothness. 

They do not look at each other, still, but something feels lighter now. Settled. He thinks she senses it too.

They stare at the ceiling until FRIDAY lets them know the sun is burgeoning over the horizon— that they’ve made it to day.

Peter’s muscles are sore. Natasha sits gingerly and he watches her rise to her feet, ease her black slippers off. Her toenails are painted bright pink. 

Peter sees and he smiles because it looks like hope.

She smiles back down at him. She smiles a lot, has many smiles, and some of them are sweet. This one is. Like silk ribbons and lemon cakes and sickly sugared tea. 

She holds a hand out to him. He takes it. 

She pulls him up, and as soon as he’s stood, her ankle sneaks behind his and her hand presses his shoulder and he’s flat on his ass again.

“Oof,” he says. “Really, Nat, don’t go breaking my— everything.”

She tosses her head back and laughs.

(Later that afternoon, when Peter goes to collect his Ruffba and store it back on its charging station, Natasha is making scrambled eggs in the kitchen, and he swears, he _swears_ he hears her mumbling under the splatter of butter, _don’t go breaking my heart. You take the weight off me…)_

**Author's Note:**

> i love you all but i might love natasha more 
> 
> please o please leave me a comment! be my friend! amigas cheetahs!
> 
> <333


End file.
